does mean that Balzac, when he wrote it, was under the burden of the very traditions which he has helped fiction to throw off.  He felt obliged to construct a mechanical plot, to surcharge his characters, to moralize openly and baldly; he permitted himself to “sympathize” with certain of his people, and to point out others for the abhorrence of his readers.  This is not so bad in him as it would be in a novelist of our day.  It is simply primitive and inevitable, and he is not to be judged by it.

IV

In the beginning of any art even the most gifted worker must be crude in his methods, and we ought to keep this fact always in mind when we turn, say, from the purblind worshippers of Scott to Scott himself, and recognize that he often wrote a style cumbrous and diffuse; that he was tediously analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic, and evolved his characters by means of long-winded explanation and commentary; that, except in the case of his lower-class personages, he made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked; that he was tiresomely descriptive; that on the simplest occasions he went about half a mile to express a thought that could be uttered in ten paces across lots; and that he trusted his readers’ intuitions so little that he was apt to rub in his appeals to them.  He was probably right:  the generation which he wrote for was duller than this; slower-witted, aesthetically untrained, and in maturity not so apprehensive of an artistic intention as the children of to-day.  All this is not saying Scott was not a great man; he was a great man, and a very great novelist as compared with the novelists who went before him.  He can still amuse young people, but they ought to be instructed how false and how mistaken he often is, with his mediaeval ideals, his blind Jacobitism, his intense devotion to aristocracy and royalty; his acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ignoble, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it were the law of God; for all which, indeed, he is not to blame as he would be if he were one of our contemporaries.  Something of this is true of another master, greater than Scott in being less romantic, and inferior in being more German, namely, the great Goethe himself.  He taught us, in novels otherwise now antiquated, and always full of German clumsiness, that it was false to good art—­which is never anything but the reflection of life—­to pursue and round the career of the persons introduced, whom he often allowed to appear and disappear in our knowledge as people in the actual world do.  This is a lesson which the writers able to profit by it can never be too grateful for; and it is equally a benefaction to readers; but there is very little else in the conduct of the Goethean novels which is in advance of their time; this remains almost their sole contribution to the science of fiction.  They are very primitive in certain characteristics, and unite with their calm,